Chapter 14 - Damien #2
I want everything. I want to know her the way I know an operation—completely, from every angle, with no detail unexplored.
I want to be in the room when she wakes up.
I want to watch her work from inside the studio instead of through a camera.
I want to hear her say my name the way she said it in the studio—rough, breathless, like it was pulled from her against her will.
I want things I can't name and don't deserve and will probably destroy by wanting them.
"I want you to stay," I say.
She stares at me. The apartment is silent—no street noise at this height, no neighbors, just the hum of systems running in walls. My world, sanitized and controlled and empty.
"Everything about you is a locked door," she says. "This apartment. Your answers. The way you look at me like you already know something I haven't told you. I feel like I'm standing outside a building with no entrance, and you keep inviting me in without showing me the door."
"Maybe the door is you."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"It means I don't know how to do this. I don't have the architecture for it—for letting someone in.
I've never had it. The apartment isn't a choice.
It's a symptom. I don't know how to make a space that has a person in it, because every space I've been in since I was twelve years old has been built to keep people out. "
I didn't plan to say that. The words spill out like weld spatter—hot, uncontrolled, landing where they land.
I watch her face change as they hit—the suspicion softening, not into trust but into something else.
Recognition. She knows what it is to build a life around absence. She knows what it costs.
"What happened when you were twelve?" she asks.
"My mother died."
The silence that follows is different from any silence we've had. Not charged. Not combative. Just—open. A space where something has been said that can't be unsaid, and both of us are standing in the aftermath.
"I'm sorry," she says. Simply. No performance of sympathy. Just the words, given cleanly.
I nod. My throat is tight. I haven't told anyone about my mother in years—the Order knows, of course, it's in my file, but I've never said the words voluntarily, as an offering, to another person. The exposure feels like standing in a cold wind without a coat.
She looks at me and I look at her and the distance between us is still ten feet but it's not the same ten feet. Something has been exchanged. Something that changes the weight distribution.
"I should go," she says. But she doesn't move.
"You should," I agree. And I take a step toward her.
Not fast. Not sudden. Slow, deliberate, the way I crossed the studio—each step a choice that doesn't feel like a choice. She watches me come. Her chin lifts. Her eyes don't leave mine.
"If I stay," she says, and her voice has dropped, roughened, "I need to know that what happens is real. Not a performance. Not a surface. If you touch me and it's another locked door, I'll—"
"It's not."
"How do I know that?"
I reach her. Close enough to feel the warmth of her body through the green dress. Close enough to see the pulse in her throat, rapid, visible. Close enough to smell her—the soap, the vanilla, the trace of metal that never entirely leaves her skin.
I take her wrist. Gently. My fingers wrap around the narrow bone, and I can feel her pulse hammering against my thumb. She doesn't pull away. Her eyes are on mine, wide, dark, the pupils blown.
"Because I'm going to show you," I say.
I lift her wrist above her head. Slowly.
Watching her face for the flinch, the resistance, the moment she decides this isn't what she wants.
Her arm goes up. Her back finds the wall behind her—she didn't know it was there, I can see the surprise in her eyes when she feels the cold plaster against her shoulders through the thin fabric of the dress.
I pin her wrist against the wall. Not hard. Not rough. But firm. The kind of grip that says I have you without saying you can't leave.
Her breathing fractures. A sharp intake, a stuttered exhale. Her free hand comes up—to push me away, I think—but it lands on my chest and stays there. Flat. Feeling my heartbeat through the shirt.
"Tell me to stop," I say.
She doesn't.
I take her other wrist. Bring it up beside the first. Hold both of them against the wall above her head with one hand, my fingers circling both wrists, and she's pinned—arms up, back against the wall, her body arched toward mine, the green dress pulling across her hips.
The sound she makes is not the sound from the studio.
It's quieter. Deeper. The sound of a woman who's discovering something about herself that she didn't know was there.
A want she's never given voice to because she's never been in a position to voice it—because voicing it means surrendering control, and control is the only thing that's ever kept her safe.
She's surrendering it. Right now. In my apartment, against my wall, with my hand around her wrists. She's letting go of the thing she's held onto for twenty-eight years, and she's terrified, and she's not stopping.
I lean in. My mouth finds her throat—not her lips, her throat. The exposed line of it, the pulse point hammering beneath the skin. I press my lips to it and feel her entire body respond—a shudder that runs from her wrists to her feet, a sound that vibrates against my mouth.
"Tell me to stop," I say again. Against her skin. Giving her the out. The door she can walk through at any moment, because everything that happens from here has to be her choice.
Her fingers curl above my grip. Her body presses toward mine. Her voice comes from somewhere deep and raw:
"Don't stop."